Ron DeSantis now says Donald Trump’s 2018 endorsement didn’t matter

President Donald Trump speaks with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as he arrives at Southwest Florida International Airport. Image via AP.

During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Ron DeSantis rebutted Donald Trump’s claim that DeSantis in 2018 “did well because (Trump) endorsed him,” made most recently by Trump during a rally in Hialeah.

“The idea that he is responsible for Florida’s success is absurd,” DeSantis told Brian Kilmeade, in an interview recorded remotely despite “Fox & Friends” actually airing from Miami on Thursday.

“If his endorsement was so important, why have Republicans been losing so many of these races where he’s endorsed, have fewer Governors than when he got elected President, fewer (U.S.) Senators, fewer U.S. House members?”

DeSantis’ remarks on the Fox News Channel are just his latest attempt to argue that Trump’s endorsement, which DeSantis lobbied for before running for Governor and promoted heavily throughout the 2018 campaign, didn’t matter much.

On the PBD Podcast in October, the Governor distanced himself from an ad depicting him as a staunch Trump defender as a naked bid for earned media.

“That’s obviously tongue in cheek. … Of course, it’s a funny video, but here’s the thing about it: When you’re doing these campaigns, you want to get as much free media as possible. So I knew that that would cause the corporate media to light their hair on fire and they did. And so they just kept playing it for me. So we didn’t even have to really pay for the ad.”

From there, DeSantis suggested that the ad’s touting of Trump wasn’t as appealing to Republican voters in the race against Adam Putnam as the depiction of his family was.

“Part of it is that ad gets out, what do the average voters see? They say, ‘Hey, this is a guy with a, you know, this beautiful wife, young kids, everything like that.’ And that, that, that kind of helped us there,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis also said he would have won in 2018 without Trump’s endorsement, which he suggested actually held him back from winning by more than 34,000 votes against Andrew Gillum.

“The test of that is I won by 34,000 with his endorsement. Four years later, he attacked me three days before the election and I won by 1.5 million votes,” DeSantis said.

“Trump was a factor in 2018. It didn’t matter what I did, they were going to vote against me. That was, that was the reason they viewed me as that.”